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How to Write a Better C-Level Marketing Resume [+Content Examples]

The role of marketing has changed so much in the past years. Marketing professionals are now finding themselves nose-deep in the growing complexities of marketing.

The new facet of marketing is the marriage between two unlikely departments: marketing and IT. This new merger between two departments actually makes a TON of sense.

Marketing jobs that collaborate with IT are popping up online. As we’re seeing with this employment opportunity at Rutgers University:

Marketers promote the products that the market demands. And, since IT departments have the ability to track user behavior and collect unprecedented psychographic and demographic data on prospects and clients, the value that IT and marketing bring to each other is nothing less than kismet. Heck, marketing departments are now developing products and programs around the findings collected by the IT department … how about that!

You might be wondering how all this has anything to do with your resume. Actually, it has a lot to do with it!

“Get busy living or get busy dying” is a famous quote from the movie, Shawshank … and if you think about this from a career perspective, you’ll find that this same quote applies to the life and death of your resume (and marketing career!) too.

First, get a handle on how the role of marketing is changing — and make sure your skill level and resume keep up!

In many ways, the technology behind marketing executive roles (e.g. Marketing Consultants & Broad Marketing Executives) is keeping pace (or possibly moving faster?) than those of IT roles. And, if your career goal is to remain in marketing, you have no choice but to ensure you remain relevant in your chosen career field.

Start by analyzing current job openings at some of the world’s largest companies.

For example, take a look at this Senior Product Marketing Manager role @Microsoft (screenshot of the job @ the right).

You will notice the mention of C+E Integrated Marketing … and you may not know what that means. Not many do.

These specific marketing skills will increasingly dominate the marketing industry. And if you don’t know, what you don’t know, until you find out you don’t know it … by then, it might be too late.

Do you want a few additional skills and keywords for your marketing resume?

Here’s a nice list of new (or, at least “newer”) keywords to get you started:

More Task Changes Amongst Marketing Professionals

The automation of job tasks is also a hot topic. A CareerBuilder survey in February 2017 showed that certain tasks that support marketing professionals, employee learning and development, orientation, engagement, and referral processes will likely be automated in the next 10 years.

With all this change, new marketing job titles are popping up too. For example:

Engagement Manager

Meme Manager

Director of First Impressions

SM/Community Executive

Sales Enablement Manager

Digital Prophet

Interactive Marketing Consultant

UI/UX VP Engineer

Director of Digital Solutions

Experience Designer

In addition to new marketing job roles, marketing departments are “deepening” too.

DigitalMarketer.com, a leading professional development firm on marketing, outlines a very in-depth staffing structure for marketing departments.

For example, this reflects much of how they break down marketing:

Content Marketing Team —

Editorial Director

Content Editors

Social & Community Managers

Acquisition Team —

VP of Marketing

Acquisition Director

Traffic Manager

Analytics Managers

Design Engineers

Monetization Team —

Director of Monetization

Director of Optimization

Marketing Coordinator

Email Marketing Specialist

Email Copywriter

The marketing field is certainly broadening, which is promising for those in and around it.

Second, write your resume to be a value-based resume.

If you’re new to this term, just know what a value-based resume is very heavy results driven. This means the inclusion of results that detail the benefits and positive results you’ve created for each employer. Whenever possible, you MUST provide readers with specifics that back up your claims.

Use these 3 accomplishment examples to help you write a better marketing resume:

[Best] Introduced BI/analytics platform that provided predictive analytics, data visualization, and qualitative research for $500MM worth of marketing expenditures. Increased earnings by 12.8% in the first 90 days and expected to generate an incremental EBITDA of up to $12MM per year.

Ideally, you always want to provide proof that what you do actually works.

It’s that simple.

Third, identify your career brand … and then make it even better!

I’ll admit, identifying one’s career brand (value proposition) isn’t always easy. Essentially, a career brand is nothing more than what you are most know for in your career field. For example, maybe you’re best known for improving engagement via social media or leveraging client personas? Maybe you’ve taken that experience and turned it into hardcore results for your employer?

Example Career Brand Statement

If this is true, your career brand to put at the top of your marketing resume might look something like this:

Aggressive Social Media Strategist Who Has Increased SM Engagement by 130% @ Past 3 Employers Took that engagement and translated it to more than $52.8MM in additional revenue in the past 5.7 years

So, how do you make your career brand better?

Start by identifying what you want to most be known for in your professional life.

Surely, I provided an idealistic example career brand statement above … and let’s say your career brand isn’t anywhere near as optimal as the above.

In this scenario, identify a “starter career brand,” so you can then focus on whether this is the brand you want to keep, change, and/or optimize.

Most often you’ll make this decision once you decide whether what area of marketing you will specialize within.

Will you be a generalist or a specialist?

Not all companies are handling marketing roles as aggressively as Microsoft.

And, if you plan to focus your marketing career on product development/management versus social media domination, your focus will dictate the appropriate career brand that fits well with your ideal marketing role.

As another example, let’s say you’re planning to pursue Microsoft and secure a position with their product development team. Then, an ideal career brand might look something like this:

Notice how this example career brand doesn’t include numbers and percentages. There are career fields that aren’t necessarily privy to bottom-line revenues, so there will be times when a career brand simply can’t include specifics to revenue increases or cost savings.

Fourth, sometimes we too easily overlook the SMALL stuff about our resumes regardless of whether we’re in sales and marketing or IT and engineering. And, we all know that the “devil is in the details.”

With that said, when you finish writing your marketing resume, I want you to ask yourself a series of important questions.

These questions will ensure that you analyze and critique your c-level marketing resume much like you would any other job search document.

For example, ask yourself questions like these:

Is my email address appropriate for someone at my career level?

Does the intro portion of my marketing resume tell the reader all the key “bits” about me?

Am I including unnecessary “bits” about me in that top section that just don’t offer much new value or mean much to my current job focus?

Have I properly shortened your LinkedIn URL? Does it look like this https://linkedin.com/in/first-lastname-347a529-1 or does it look like more like this https://linkedin.com/in/first-lastname?

Will recruiters and HR managers not grant you a job interview over such small details?

Actually, you’d be surprised at how many won’t because in the “art of business” these small details could cost hundreds of thousands or maybe millions in lost revenue.

Think about that.

When writing your c-level marketing resume, start by knowing how marketing roles are changing, how you need to refocus your marketing career and resume to align with those changes and don’t overlook the not-so-small details such as your career brand. Reflecting your value to potential new employers isn’t a recent development in the hiring space, but certainly, a game changer that few marketing professionals actually leverage.